When the Internet was created, decades ago, one thing was inevitable: the war today over how (or whether) to control it, and who should have that power. Battle lines have been drawn between repressive regimes and Western democracies, corporations and customers, hackers and law enforcement. Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.”

But this time, the company that received the request pushed back. It told the agency that it wanted to tell its customer that he or she was being targeted, which would give the customer a chance to fight the request in court, as a group of Twitter users did last year when the Justice Department sought their records under a different kind of request. The minor defiance in this latest case was enough to land the NSL request in a federal court docket last Friday, where the government filed a request for a court order to force the company to adhere to the gag order.

In its petition, the government asserted that disclosure of the fact or contents of its NSL “may endanger the national security of the United States” and urged the court to issue an order binding the company to the nondisclosure provision, or be in violation of federal law and face contempt charges.”

Three of the IP addresses used by the servers that controlled the compromised systems observed by SecureWorks also overlapped with addresses that hosted servers used in attacks last year on RSA. The attackers used their access to RSA’s systems to steal highly sensitive data related to the company’s two-factor SecurID authentication tokens that 40 million employees use to access corporate and government networks. The IP addresses belong to the China Beijing Province Network’s autonomous system 4808, which researchers say has long been a hotbed for espionage-related malware.”

To some extent we all have the impression that the scientific method makes things move forward based on a set of principles and when one thinks on science, peer reviewed publications and credibility, the concept of reproducibility stands tall.

Making available all the components of a scientific experiment may be a complex task, but guarantees that the community can fully validate the produced results.

In this article from Nature the authors make a reflection on the impact of code un-disclosure when it comes to science.

Much of the debate about code transparency involves the philosophy of science, error validation and research ethics, but our contention is more practical: that the cause of reproducibility is best furthered by focusing on the dissection and understanding of code, a sentiment already appreciated by the growing open-source movement.

Forensic activity cannot fully match to science practice. Of course we can talk about “forensic sciences” as the body of knowledge related to our activities, but we forensic experts (most often) work over concrete instances, not general or abstract matters. But the concept of reproducibility is key to provide support for the basic principles of due process, especially for the impact it may have on the principle of contradiction.

From the forensic perspective we should think about the implications of code un-disclosure in the rights of people.